How to Create a Custom Plugin in WordPress

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How to Create a Custom Plugin in WordPress

 

Creating your own custom plugin is not rocket science. That’s right you can create your very own WordPress plugin from scratch without much difficulty. Anyone with skills enough to write basic PHP and modifying a theme can create a plugin.

A plugin is a simple program that has a set of functions, that adds a specific set of features and services which can be executed in different sections of your WordPress website.

This is how we started the K2 Blocks plugin (it’s free so you can try it) and that’s how you can start yours too.

Why Create a Plugin

 

Most people edit the theme to customize and add functionality to get the result they want for their website. This is fine but there are also cases where adding custom functionality to a plugin is a better option and here is why.

Consider this scenario that if for some reason you had functionality to your theme and it works but when you change the theme that custom functionality will be gone on the other hand if you would have customized the plugin instead of the theme the functionality would still be there.

Create your Plugin in few steps

Now let me show you how to start with plugin development.

Step 1: Use FTP on your website

 

The first thing we need to do is access our site using FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Its file manager is used to access files from the site. Many hosting providers also provide the file manager with it. so that they can upload or download files from their web hosting server directly from within their control panel. WordPress users may need an FTP client to upload WordPress files to their web hosting server before they can install WordPress.

If you want to more about FTP click here.

Step 2: Go to WordPress Plugin Folder and Create a New folder

After accessing the site from FTP. You need to get the WordPress plugin folder. The Folder is Located at a /wp-content/plugins. Here create a new folder by giving it a unique name in lowercase letters such as the first-plugin after that enter into the folder and got to the next step.

 

Step 3: Create a PHP Script for your Plugin

Next, we will create the main file for our plugin. To do that, we create a PHP file within our new plugin folder and give it the same name such as first-plugin.php. After you’ve done that, open your plugin’s main file and get ready to do some editing.

Step 4: Setup the plugin’s Information

Now, copy and paste the plugin information below into your main plugin file. Make sure to edit the details such as Plugin Name and Plugin URI as they pertain to your plugin.

<?php

/**

 * Plugin Name: Our First Plugin

 * Plugin URI: http://www.ourwebsite.com/first-plugin

 * Description: The very first plugin that I have ever created.

 * Version: 1.0

 * Author: Your Name

 * Author URI: http://www.ourwebsite.com

 */

That’s it! You’ve just completed the minimum number of steps that are required to create a WordPress plugin. You can now activate it within the WordPress admin and revel in all of your glory.

Adding Some Functionality to the Plugin

Now that you have a plugin, let’s make it do something.

The easiest way to make things happen in WordPress is with actions and filters. Let’s explore that by creating a simple action that adds a line of text below all of the posts on your site. Copy and paste this code into your main plugin file (below the plugin information) and save it.

add_action( ‘the_content’, ‘my_plugins_text’ );

function my_thank_you_text ( $content )

{

    return $content .= ‘ Thank you for reading!

‘;

}

This code hooks into “the_content” action that fires when WordPress renders the post content for your site. When that action fires, WordPress will call our “my_plugins_text” function that is defined below the “add_action” call.

Also Read : How to Restore WordPress from Backup.

Actions and Filters in WordPress

When you’re going to start coding your plugins. I highly suggest you familiarize yourself with how actions and filters work and which ones are available for you to use. WordPress Codex is where you will find more about it.

Plugins API: Actions and Filters

Plugin API: Action Reference

Plugin API: Filter Reference

Conclusion

If you haven’t already, create your first plugin!

Creating WordPress plugins is extremely liberating and a great way to gain a deeper knowledge of how WordPress works. If you haven’t already, I strongly urge you to try your hand at creating a plugin. If you do and come up with something useful, don’t forget that you can distribute it freely to others via the WordPress plugin directory.

K2 Plugins has developed K2 blocks which is a WordPress plugin You can contact us for custom plugin development at our Official site

Have you already created your first plugin or plan on creating one soon? If so, I would love to hear about it in the comments below!

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